Active Messages communication architectures have been shown to satisfy these criteria. Software implementations of Active Messages have reduced communication overhead by over an order of magnitude to near the minimum possible given existing hardware. This project takes the next step and defines a hardware implementation of Active Messages, resulting in another order of magnitude reduction in communication overhead.
The Active Message communication architecture defined in this report is an extension to the MIPS-II instruction set architecture. The resulting architecture features data transfer directly to/from processor registers, hardware dispatch directly to Active Message handlers (along with limited context preservation), automatic atomicity of handlers, inexpensive synchronization operations, and hardware support for multicast.
[1] Thorsten von Eicken. ``Active Messages: an Efficient Communication Architecture for Multiprocessors," Ph.D. Thesis, U.C. Berkeley, December 1993.